ESPN Caps Off Record-Breaking ‘Monday Night Football’ Season With a Bang
ESPN concluded its strong NFL season with their Super Wild Card Monday night finale between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The game sent ESPN out with a bang, generating more than 28.6 million viewers across ESPN, ABC, ESPN2, ESPN+, and NFL+.
Photo: Bleeding Green Nation
The game was ESPN’s second most-watched NFL playoff game in history, behind last year’s game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Buccaneers. That game proved to be Tom Brady’s final game in the league.
PHOTO BY MIKE EHRMANN/GETTY IMAGES
When the final audience is reported, Eagles-Buccaneers is expected to surpass 29 million viewers. Last season’s Buccaneers-Cowboys game managed a record-settting 21,201,000 viewers.
A Record-Breaking Night For Disney
Monday night’s 28,619,000 viewers beat out ESPN’s viewership for its first eight Playoff games beginning in 2014. Seven of those eight games also aired on ABC.
Extending beyond ESPN, Monday night’s game surpassed the audience of 13 of the 14 NFL Playoff games that aired on ABC between 1996 and 2005. 1996 was, of course, the year that Disney purchased ABC. That means that the Monday night game was Disney’s third-highest-rated game ever aired.
Photo: Sporting News
The success of Monday night’s broadcast of the Eagles-Buccaneers game capped off a record-breaking season for Monday Night Football. The iconic football broadcast had its best overall viewership in more than 23 years and aired its four most-watched games since 2000.
With ESPN and Disney preparing to usher in the streaming era, live sports will continue to be the network’s backbone. After a strong season of Monday Night Football, however, the demise of linear television may have been overstated.
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